Stateline has confirmed that at the meeting the ACT was warned of a massive exposure if the forecast dire weather conditions materialised.

NSW made an open-ended offer of assistance.

The ACT asked for just four task forces -- that is, 20 trucks and crews.

These were in place by Friday and Saturday morning.

PHIL KOPERBERG, NSW FIRE CHIEF: Given the fact that the weather is going to deteriorate again at the weekend, and possibly quite severely, the job is still ahead of them.

CHRIS UHLMANN: However, even two days later, that same sense of urgency was not being expressed at a local level.

REPORTER: How far are the fires from Canberra and what are the chances that it will reach the edge?

PETER LUCAS-SMITH, ACT FIRE CONTROLLER: Well, the fires are a fair way away from the edge of the urban area of the ACT Under north-west wind conditions, the chance of them reaching the urban edge is pretty slim.

REPORTER: You were saying yesterday that there was a minimal chance of the fires reaching suburban Canberra.

Is that still your assessment, or have you re-evaluated your view?

PETER LUCAS-SMITH: I think the word 'minimal' is your word.

There has always been a chance that the fire would reach the urban area.

I think that that chance still exists, and it's certainly not out of our planning arrangements.

But they are precautionary arrangements at this stage.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Natalie Larkins was working in the ABC Radio newsroom that Saturday and she says she made numerous attempts throughout the morning to get fresh information on the fires from the Emergency Services Bureau.

She says she was promised a briefing by the bureau's director, Mike Castle, at 11am.

NATALIE LARKINS, ABC JOURNALIST: I called again.

And again, I said, "I need fresh information.

We are coming up to the 12 o'clock bulletin.

People want to know what is going on."

CHRIS UHLMANN: That briefing never happened.

It wasn't until midday when the 12 o'clock bulletin was already going to air that a press conference was called.

NATALIE LARKINS: There certainly was no sense that within three hours we were going to have lost 500 houses on the urban fringe of Canberra.

We're hearing on the one hand that this fire is spotting out 8km to 10km from the firefront, then we are hearing the firefront is 8km to 10km from Canberra.

I mean, it doesn't take much to put two and two together and, of course in my context, I was incredibly worried because my house itself was right on that western fringe of Canberra and right in the firing line, so to speak.

CHRIS UHLMANN: While the noon press conference is under way, alarm bells ARE ringing elsewhere in the city.

At 12:20, the officer in charge of operations at police headquarters calls the Emergency Services Bureau and advises that a state of emergency needs to be declared.

The advice is rejected.

At 2:30, the emergency warning signal is sounded on ABC Radio.

The state of emergency is declared at 2:45, more than two hours after the first police request was made and 30 minutes before the fires hit Duffy.

If communicating with each other was a problem, it was just as hard communicating with the troops on the ground.

PAUL CANON, CANDLAGAN BRIGADE: Well, in the area we were, there was virtually -- we had no communications with the ACT at all.

We were getting all our information from Queanbeyan.

There was no -- we had no radio communications with the ACT at all, none at all.

CHRIS UHLMANN: The ACT and NSW radio systems are incompatible, which means interstate teams working together had to improvise.

MIKE LONERGAN, FORMER CHAIR BUSH BRIGADES: On the Friday night by the end of the night -- that is, about midnight -- the ACT radio system was virtually in tatters, as it was from about 10 o'clock to 11 o'clock on the Saturday morning, it was producing a whole series of static and very few messages.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Another system pushed to the limit is the one that keeps track of the trucks -- computer-aided despatch.

MICHAEL BOLITHO, FORMER EMERGENCY SERVICES MEMBER: There were a lot of people who were not used, partly because the vehicles were being tasked the wrong way and people were just being left behind and partly because, I think, the command and control structures broke down to the extent that they really didn't know where people were.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Michael Bolitho was a volunteer working with the ACT Emergency Service and he remains bitter that his team was not called on.

MICHAEL BOLITHO: We advised the Emergency Services Bureau that we were here and that we had transport.

And we stayed here until they stood us down late at night.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Another resource close by was Airservices Australia.

It has four tankers at Canberra airport which can pump vast amounts of water while they're on the move.

On that Saturday, Airservices Australia offered up these three tankers for the firefighting effort.

No-one called them back.

And, from further afield, some firefighting units from around NSW were trying to get to Canberra.

RON WINTER, VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTER: They arrived at Batemans Bay at 15:55 and they hit the road right on 16:00.

At 16:05, the task force received a radio message to say that they were to abort the mission, that they were no longer required.

CHRIS UHLMANN: To the best of your knowledge, how many units within, say, a 1.5-hour or 2-hour drive of Canberra were either not called on or told that they weren't needed or to turn back on that day?

RON WINTER: Talking to various people in the immediate week after the fire, I got up to around about 27 and gave up.

So there could have been any number.

CHRIS UHLMANN: For a disaster that came as such a shock to everyone that Saturday afternoon, one more question has to be asked -- did the bureau have a comprehensive emergency communications plan on the day?

NATALIE LARKINS: I was greatly alarmed at the fact that there didn't seem to be a plan.

Halfway through the morning I had spoken to one of the media people and said, "Do you have our numbers?

Why aren't you contacting us?

Will you contact us if something is going on?"

They didn't have our numbers.

I had to sit down and type out a list of people to contact in radio and television, in news, in programs, and fax it off to them so they knew who to contact to let us know if something was happening.

That should not have happened.

There should have always been an open communication line.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Stateline has confirmed that a consultant was hired on the day after the fires to write a communications plan.